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The Best, and Worst, Places To Drive Your Electric Car
sciencehabit writes For those tired of winter, you're not alone. Electric cars hate the cold, too. Researchers have conducted the first investigation into how electric vehicles fare in different U.S. climates. The verdict (abstract): Electric car buyers in the chilly Midwest and sizzling Southwest get less bang for their buck, where poor energy efficiency and coal power plants unite to turn electric vehicles into bigger polluters.
Found this link in submissions...- http://news.sciencemag.org/cli...
I'm guessing that this is the link: http://news.sciencemag.org/cli...
wot no sig
He's right, EVs are ideal in our temperatures and very popular in northern Europe. A low centre of gravity makes them handle well on slippery roads and pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Range is reduced a little but as long as your name isn't Broder and you planned for that they are wonderful.
Speaking as a Leaf owner in northern Europe.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't think the average Tesla buyer buys the car because it's 'green'. They buy it because it's electric sports car. Being electric, the (peak) power output is much much higher than achievable with combustion engines.
Then, the battery problem will likely solve itself over the next decennia. We may not have reached the optimal solution, but Tesla clearly shows there is a market for what is available with current-day technology.
Other car manufacturers are going the hybrid road to increase efficiency. But i do agree that the 'green' aspect is misleading, in general. If we want to be green, best thing we can do is reduce the amount of times and distances we (need to) travel; improve public transport and promote/easify carpooling. Yet, i think electric cars are here, and are here to stay, just as gasoline cars are, for the foreseeable future.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. (As a Tesla owner.) Charge time is largely irrelevant. I plug in every evening (just like with my phone) and next morning have full range available. Meanwhile, my wife often has barely enough gas in her car in the morning to be able to get to the gas station. And battery technology is going to continue to improve. Why wouldn't it? With solar in my roof and a battery buried in my back yard, I will soon be living with free energy. As long as those who want us all to continue to live in the past don't blow us up first, anyway.
Well, at least the pollution they caused wasn't being ejected into city centers where people would immediately breathe it in, but instead at a centralized location where big bucks could be spent to achieve big gains of pollution reduction.
The main benefit of electric vehicles is the ability to move to an electricity-based society, at which point the problem that would remain is getting clean electricity. Filling a desert with solar power plants would probably do it.
Pre-heating is heating up the interior while it is still charging, so as to use less charge for heating once you depart. Heating takes a lot of energy and drains the battery faster, as I understand even more than cooling.
Of course, gas vehicles can be pre-heated as well, you just start them up a bit before you depart ( but you don't want to do that in a closed garage!)
1500 Tesla's were sold in the Netherlands last year out of 400k in total, or around 0.4% [link]. However, in total electric+hybrid cars were about 4.3% of total [link]. So, while they are obviously not the majority, they are certainly not rare either. Amsterdam has almost 500 public charge locations [link] and in the center (where parking space is scarce) there are designated parking spaces for electric cars where they can charge, see e.g. this street view of what would be the closest parking spot to my house if I had an electric car. There are two taxi companies that use electric vehicles exclusively, which is good news since taxis have disproportionate impact on air pollution, one drives Nissan Leaf and the other Tesla. As far as I know they are not directly subsidized apart from general subsidies on electric cars, so they must be commercially viable.
All in all, electric cars are not some sort of pipe dream, they are out there and have small but growing market share, and infrastructure is growing with it. For each consumer a different tradeoff will be in order (e.g. I use my car a couple times every month so got a small gasoline car instead, while a friend commutes 50km every day so he got a Tesla). It still uses some government subsidy, but honestly, so do oil and traditional car makers.
I think unless batteries get much better in capacity vs weight and someone can figure out how to recharge them a lot faster. We will never see EV's as a viable solution to the masses.
I have an EV (Honda Fit). I think that they're already useful for something like 3/4 of the population. Lots of parts to the equation. Right now they're better as the second car of a two or more car family, but they can be the only car depending on your driving pattern. They're great for someone who has a defined commute, as opposed to someone who drives to work and then drives around as part of their work. They're better when you have a garage or dedicated driveway, probably not so good right now if you have to park curbside. Right now some of them suffer pretty big range loss in cold weather (mine has about 50% range in the dead of winter compared to summer time and that definitely needs to be addressed, but I don't see why it can't be improved substantially).
Charge time is only an issue in rare circumstances; the problem is that people who don't drive an EV tend to think of recharging like going to the gas station; something you do when the tank runs low. That's not how most of us use the EV, though. Typically I use it on trips which I know I can make without recharging. (in warmer months I can drive 100 miles without recharge). The recharge happens at night, or between trips. A typical trip for me is to drive 50-60 miles and get home with 1/2 charge. I plug in to the dryer outlet in my garage and within 90 minutes it's full again. So, I may run some errands, go home and grab lunch, and by the time I'm done with lunch the car is fully charged again, ready for more errands. Or, if I commute to work I get home with 1/2 charge and again, within 90 minutes it's fully charged if I want to go out to dinner etc. Even if I use the full charge (which is very very rare) I typically recharge overnight so by the time I wake up in the morning it's ready to go. My point is that with a few exceptions you don't notice the charge time because it charges while you're doing something else. This means that I almost never have to wait for the car to charge. That said, if I had to do a road trip I could see myself doing it if I had to spend 20 minutes recharging every 200 miles. I'm sure high speed charging will improve, and by the time we hit 10-15 minutes to recharge after 200 miles of driving I think we hit diminishing returns, i.e. it'll be short enough I won't care whether they make it any faster or not.
Similarly, many non-EV people worry about the number of charging stations. Again, my typical use is that I don't have to use a charging station because I plan my trips so that I can make the full trip without recharging, but as an example if I need to drive into Boston (35 miles) I can make it there and back without a recharge, but if I also need to do another stop that's going to require more than another 20 miles of driving, then I'll plan to park in Boston at a charging station. If I've used 35 miles of charge, it only takes 20 minutes to fully recharge, so unless I'm running an especially short errand in Boston the car will be fully charged by the time I get back to it. One way to measure what percentage of my trips are EV friendly is to look at when I use the EV versus the gas car. During the summer, I find I use the gas car about once a month. That's about how often I have a trip to make that the EV doesn't have the range for. My next EV will have at least 200 miles of range and at that point I expect only 1 or 2 trips a YEAR won't fit the profile (and I'll just rent a car for those 2 trips).
All the calculations I've done show that my direct operating costs (i.e. cost to "fill the tank") is about 1/5th of what it costs when I drive a gasoline car. I also save on maintenance - there are no scheduled oil changes or tuneups... just a tire rotation that the dealership did for free. So, it's actually costing me quite a bit less than 1/5th of operating my gasoline car (Subaru Imprezza STi). Right
I would say that if you could find a "Supermodels Who Love Environmentalists" convention, that would be the best place to drive an EV to.
Basically you have a timer that you can programme to turn on the heating. I have mine turn on Monday to Friday 15 minutes before I go to work. When I come out the car is nice and warm inside, and any mist/ice on the windows has been cleared. Because the car is plugged in it doesn't drain the battery at all.
I can also activate it remotely via a web site or phone app.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
With solar in my roof and a battery buried in my back yard, I will soon be living with free energy. >
You got all that for free?
"Decennia" is plural, so presumably he means over the next couple of decades.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread
Well electric block/interior heaters is hardly exclusive to EVs and diesel cars can generally do this without a grid connection using its own fuel. But yes it does come "free" by having to plug in the car to charge anyway and you have to if you want the advertised range. From what I gather if you're at a cabin with no/solar power and can't plug your EV in it'll use a lot of power just to get started in the cold.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Read the actual numbers... "(170 Wh/km), whereas the upper Midwest fared the worst in terms of energy efficiency (196 Wh/km; red)". We're talking about a 13% difference - the article uses the 15% figure from 170, cheating IMHO. BFD, one way or the other, yet the graph varies from green to BRIGHT RED!!!!
More numbers; even if you power your electric car on 100% coal, its about twice as clean per mile than a gasoline engine. The math is trivial and I suggest everyone try it themselves:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Do your calculations include the cost of a replacement battery?
No, and this is not well understood yet. When I was a kid cars seldom lasted more than 60,000 miles. Now 200,000 is pretty common. So, a good question is what's the average life of a gasoline car, and how many battery swaps might you expect in an EV over the same mileage?
Another thing to consider is that many people believe the cost of replacement batteries will decrease substantially over time, so how long it takes you to put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on the car may substantially change what you end up paying to replace the battery pack.
According to Wikipedia:
The Fit EV employs Toshiba's SCiB batteries that can be recharged to 80% capacity in 15 minutes and can be recharged up to 4,000 times, more than 2.5 times that of other Li-ion batteries.
So, that could mean up to 400,000 miles if you believe them, but I'm skeptical of hitting numbers like that. But it might suggest that 150,000 to 200,000 miles on a battery pack is a reasonable expectation. Unfortunately, because my Fit is a compliance/lease-only car I'll never get to find out - I'll need to return it long before I can put enough miles on it to see the battery degrade. But I'll get back to you after I put a couple hundred thousand miles on my next EV ;-)
I take it that either
a) the nearest gas station is ~100 miles away, or
b) your wife is an idiot?
Face it, it's not that hard to stop at a gas station on the way home from work rather than drive till there's teacup of gas left in the tank.
For that matter (anecdotal evidence from where I live) there are half a dozen gas station within five miles of where I live - it takes even the worst performing of our cars less than a quart of gas to go five miles.
Either way, having "barely enough gas in her car in the morning to get to the gas station" is a situation that shouldn't happen "often"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I know that my current gas vehicle (2010 Elantra) gets about 360 miles per tank in summer, and goes down to 280 miles per tank in winter, due to (Canadian) road conditions and temperature.
If an electric only gets 15% worse, as the article seems to imply, this is still an improvement over my increased gas consumption in winter...
This isn't USA Today - he should be able to use his full vocabulary - it is trivial to right-click the word and learn something.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Way to misunderstand it.
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not turn the heat/cooling on you get better milage... even in a ICE vehicle. However because of the heat generated by the engine being added to the heat generated by driving and the ambient heat, electric cars will perform poorer in hot environments because the parts get hotter and can't be cooled as effectively.In a ICE, the thermal limit is higher, but even regular ICE vehicles will suffer in a desert.
When it comes down to it, the most efficient energy usage is actually electric rail vehicles (and I'm not talking about light rail, I'm talking about grade-separated heavy-rail/commuter rail, and driverless metros), this is because "people" over-apply brakes, and make a lot of inefficient driving decisions for acceleration. However even real systems suffer in high temperatures. Rails actually buckle if they're not welded and bolted to concrete ties.
Oil refined to petrol burnt in an engine of an ICE to move it can be compared to coal burnt in a power station to produce electricity stored and used in an EV.
Wow, tell me about it.
PS Top Gear faked that Tesla running out. .... Except you appear to be far more gullible than top gear think anyone is who watches their show.
I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about. Faked what Tesla?
Elon could take your post and use it to reopen the case and likely win.
LoL! 400-130 = 270 miles. The FTP-75 figure for a Tesla's range with a 85kWh battery is 265 miles.
Well done, you gullible shitheat!
Wow, LoL! My original post wan't really that serious, but it obviously all went over your head. When the OP talked about "laziness", a completely wrong and arrogant assumption about the motives of anyone with contrary arguments, I immediately thought of walking instead, and then of pushing a car. You really need to lighten up a bit, this is not religion or politics.
There are taxi companies in the UK that use Leafs. Some of them have 150k miles on the clock, mostly rapid charging which is the harshest for the batteries, and they are seeing around 10% degradation after about 2.5 years of that kind if punishment.
Tesla have tested their packs up to 750k miles with about 16% capacity loss. It was an artificial test of course but suggests that battery life isn't going to be an issue for most owners, and meets the spec of the cells they use (300 miles from a full charge, 3000 cycle lifetime = 900,000 miles to 20% capacity loss).
Basically, unless you pack has some kind of fault lifespan should not be an issue for most people. Nissan offer replacement packs for $4000, but no-one has ever bought one. Even when the pack does get to 80% capacity it could still be useful - a Tesla will still do 200+ miles on that, or it could be used as a storage system for a house.
I'd say you are no more likely to need a new battery than you would be to need a new engine in an ICE car. Most people never will, unless they are very unlucky or do so many miles that the savings over an ICE will have paid for the battery many times over anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
OTOH gas cars use the engine waste heat for heating.
What do you do with that waste heat in the summer?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
It's not exclusive to EVs, but it does cost you less in them because electricity is much cheaper than petrol. It often works better as well as ICE cars usually rely on the engine to provide heat, meaning they need to waste time waiting for it to warm up before they can begin warming the cabin. EVs usually have some other method of generating heat for the cabin, such as the heat pump in my Leaf.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Way to misunderstand it.
Consider your post is the clueless ones and mods have sent it from 0 to +3, well...
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
All heaters help, which is why I said block/interior. Even a block heater will help the usual warming system deliver warmer air much faster, interior heaters warm the entire interior and there's the "full package" that does both. And the last car I saw without electric heating in the seats was in the 90s, still doesn't change that windows fog up, your hands get cold and so on. This "seat only" warming is a power saving measure since using power for heating steals range. How comfy do you really think it is to have one hot side - your backside - and one cold side?
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
*facepalm* Take a look at DEFA warmup, ZeroStart or any other of a ton of integrated or not so integrated solutions to do what you say they don't. Do you live in California or something? The exact same kind of pre-heating solutions have existed for decades.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not turn the heat/cooling on you get better milage... even in a ICE vehicle.
That is blatantly false:
At -20C, the use of a block heater can improve overall fuel economy by as much as 10 percent. In a test program conducted by Environment Canada, a vehicle sitting at -25C was warmed using a block heater and then driven over a simulated urban driving cycle. This resulted in a 25 percent reduction in fuel consumption compared to cold-starting the vehicle and driving it over the same route
For the metric and Google-impaired, -20C and -25C is -4F and -13F respectively.
However because of the heat generated by the engine being added to the heat generated by driving and the ambient heat, electric cars will perform poorer in hot environments because the parts get hotter and can't be cooled as effectively.In a ICE, the thermal limit is higher, but even regular ICE vehicles will suffer in a desert.
Deserts are kinda the opposite end of the scale here. In cold weather, ICE cars perform weak and electrics worse. And yes, electrics like Nissan Leaf use an electric heater to heat the battery when it's too cold. Tesla doesn't, which makes it sluggish the first minutes in the cold. And heating the interior will use electric power that could have been used for range in both. In ICE cars it'll just sap a little of the battery that'll recharge as you drive, in EVs it's a real drain.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Heating in gas cars is accomplished by diverting some of the engine coolant to a small radiator in the cabin ventilation system. In the summer, you simply don't run hot coolant through the cabin and run it all through the radiator outside of the cabin.
As Hog said, you waste it all in the summer. It's an added efficiency to the whole system in the winter.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
> So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency;
To some extent. The main problem is that it flattens the battery more quickly and impacts range in winter time, the actual cost of the heater for an hour or two is generally relatively trivial compared to the other costs of running the car.
The newer electric cars have much less of an issue though. Instead of using electric heaters they run the air conditioner in reverse (it's an 'air source heat pump' in fact) and most of the heat energy then comes from the external environment rather than resistive heating. The heat pump uses about 1/3 of the power.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Not only cost though.
People just like having great cars. Electric cars are quiet, zippy, reliable and easy to use. When you go back to a fossil fuel car afterwards, it's like going back in time.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Actually rapid charge isn't that bad; you normally only rapid charge to 80%. It's rapid charging to 100% that's the most problematic.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"and pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread
I think betty white is the best thing since sliced bread
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
To give you an idea my Leaf loses about 5% range if I have the heating and air-con (dehumidifier) on. In other words, about 5 miles of range. It's really not a big deal.
Having said that, I rarely keep the heater on for very long. The car is pre-warmed or warms up quickly. The AC has a dehumidifier so the windows defog in less than 10 seconds. The rear window heater uses the 12V battery so does not impact range at all, as do the heated seats and heated steering wheel.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I looked it up to verify and actually it's about a 10% loss, so 90% efficiency. There are several manufacturers, so quite a bit of information available on-line. Here's one: http://www.evwireless.net/
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If I come out and directly say that I like electric vehicles and wish that we could stop burning gasoline in cars, could I get some replies to my comments that are actually replying to my comment and not refuting weird arguments that I'm not actually making? I see now why people put those disclaimers at the end of their posts to try and head off these kinds of replies.
You do see that nowhere, in any of my posts in this thread, was I comparing the efficiency of gas engines to electric drive systems, right? I was merely referencing the technical implementation of heating systems in gas burning cars and being a pedant about the use of the terms efficiency vs inefficiency.
Ugh. The posts here aren't even about nerdish oneupsmanship and pedantry anymore. Slashdot is increasingly driven by boring ideological quibbles and a dearth of reading comprehension.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.